In Zurich, we have crafted a store that is deliberately unadorned and almost rudimentary in its use of reduxed construction material.

Zurich is a remarkably clean and ordered city. The construction sites are surreal in their lack of chaos and clutter. They uniformly use a yellow hording board that we thought could be refashioned into the store. It appealed to us to take something so common from the urban landscape and have it looked at afresh, and to give it another life within a building rather than outside of it. The boards came from all over Zurich, so we have the history of many different sites here in the Aesop store.

Zurich is a city that takes a very proactive approach to reusing and recycling materials. Out of regard for the sensibility of the city, and because of our own leanings, we wanted to reuse a material that was part of the fabric of the city.

We were also inspired by a local company called Freitag, which makes water-resistance messenger bags from reused truck tarps, car seat belts and tire inner tubes. We liked the idea, again, of taking material from various places and bringing it together to express something entirely different.

The existing space consisted of two distinct characteristics: A long a low main floor forming the main expanse and a high and slender window display area. Our intention was to exaggerate these two spatial situations by suspending the hoarding boards from steel tubes above. The entire store hovers and at no point does it touch the ground. The resulting effect is one of tangible scale and confrontation, with almost all product at eye level upon entering the store.